Boundless Yet Beautiful: Understanding God’s Perfect Power

Boundless Yet Beautiful: Understanding God’s Perfect Power

In this month’s article, I want to take my readers and listeners into the boundless beauty of God’s perfect power. Just as we did last month, we will focus on what God is not and what God is. This month, instead of exploring His omnipresence, we will consider His omnipotence—His power.

If you stay with me, here is what I hope you will take away: God’s power is not reckless, limited, unfair, or disproportionate. Rather, it is calculated, purposeful, unignorable, and the very fabric and substance that holds all things together.

What God’s Power Is Not

To understand what God’s power is not, it helps to compare it with something familiar to all of us—human power, which is limited. All humans grow tired and wear out. The average person needs six to eight hours of sleep every twenty-four hours just to keep their mind and body functioning properly. The machines we invent, even by God’s grace, require oil, fuel, and regular maintenance. Yet the one true, living God is the opposite.

He needs nothing to recharge or replenish Him. Weariness never overtakes Him. The same power He possessed when He created the world is the exact same power He possesses today. He does not expend energy—yet He creates. He does not waste energy, because a holy and perfect God cannot waste anything; it is contrary to His perfect nature.

Compared to humans, God’s power is unlimited. Yet it is also restrained by His meekness. It is controlled and calculated. For example, as I look out my office window right now, I see much-needed rain gently trickling down. God gives the gift of rain, but it does not usually fall in five-thousand-pound sheets that crush everything in its path. No—God’s power is meek and measured, kissing the thirsty earth one drop at a time.

I am aware of tornadoes and hurricanes. Even these are expressions of controlled power, used by God for His decreed purposes. This shows us that God’s power is not reckless.

People often focus on the chaotic appearance of a hurricane or the destruction left by a tornado and wonder how a good God could allow such things. Yet this does not mean God is unfair. It simply reveals that the world is broken and groans for the final redemption of all creation:

“We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” (Romans 8:22)

The loss of life and property in such disasters is truly tragic. But God is the One who gave every person life, and He is the One who determines how and when that life ends. There is purpose even in what feels like paralyzing loss. We can trust that God’s omnipotence is neither unfair nor disproportionate to His goodness.

His power and His goodness operate in perfect unison. Good things are never lavished on anyone outside of His wise and decreed purpose. Likewise, difficult things are never permitted outside of that same wise purpose. When God allows hardship—even the death of a young child in a storm—unbelievers may accuse Him of cruelty. Such accusations come from finite minds with limited knowledge. They charge an infinite, omniscient, and omnipotent God with wrongdoing while remaining blind to both His purpose and His eternal plan.

God’s power is always calculated and purposeful.

What God’s Power Is

God’s power is calculated and distributed throughout every created thing to bring Him maximum glory. God’s glory is the weight of all that He is. If we could somehow compress everything God is into a five-gallon bucket (which, of course, we cannot), that would be a faint picture of His glory. Everything that happens does so to display His glory, because He has purposed it—either directly or indirectly.

His power is the very reason time, matter, and space exist:

“For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.” (Romans 11:36)

This is the fabric that holds all things together and sustains everything that exists. The Apostle Paul poetically captures it: all things come from Him, are held together through Him, and will ultimately return to Him—not in some New Age sense of reincarnation, but in the sense of giving an account to the Creator.

Some people willfully ignore this great God, even though they know He exists:

“Since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” (Romans 1:19-20)

Believers finally become honest and acknowledge what everyone already knows deep down. God, in His power, has lifted the veil from our eyes. We worship and thank Him for the grace we do not deserve. By the power of His Spirit, He has made our stony hearts alive. Now we see—though still dimly—and we breathe His air with thankful lungs.

The accusations have stopped. In their place is humble adoration for His power to save and His power to sustain even the smallest, most insignificant life.

The boundless beauty of God’s power, when compared to our limited and finite existence, is something worthy of true worship through Jesus Christ.

Application:

1. Where do you need to grow in understanding that God’s power is not limited, but controlled?

2. How are you doing internalizing a God whose power is comprehensively calculated, not capricious?

3. How are you doing understanding and accepting a God whose power is glorious, not cruel?

4. How are you doing, worshiping the boundless beauty of God’s perfect power?

Until next month, go out and share the gospel so that lives may be transformed.